


The Redemption of Stephen

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-01
Updated: 2009-11-01
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:31:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1631657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four encounters with four different Maries, and Stephen begins to see a new way of being.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Redemption of Stephen

**Author's Note:**

> Written for afrai

 

 

1\. Mary Llewellyn

'After the war, you will send me away from you,' Mary had said, and Stephen must confess the truth of that prophecy. She could not bear to watch the two of them stumbling down the Rue Jacob, walking away from her forever, her lover and her friend. She would never see either of them again, of course; they must part now, and their paths would not cross in the future. Whatever lay ahead in Stephen's bleak pilgrimage through life, Mary Llewellyn would not be at her side to see it.

At her knee, David whined, perhaps conscious only of his mistress' distress, perhaps knowing that his two greatest friends beside her had left him. Stephen bent to scratch his ears, and his whining subsided. He lay his head on her knee and looked up at her with mournful eyes. _Where has she gone_ , he seemed to be saying, _and when will she come back?_

And Stephen could not but feel guiltier than ever. For, though she had indubitably done right in sending Mary away from her to seek a life of normality with a man who would love her, she had lied to her, hurt her and forced her against her own will to leave her. She would have dashed after Mary and begged for her forgiveness for hurting her so, but that was unthinkable. No, she must soldier on, faithful unto the end, and though all mankind turned away from her, there was still a dog who loved her.

***

2\. Maria Susanna Adler von Hentzau

She was young, barely twenty-one, a black-haired imp who spoke French with an Austrian accent, and English with an American one. She came from somewhere east of the Alps - no one was quite sure where - and was rumoured to be the daughter of one of the last century's most notorious figures, although the rumour appeared to have been propagated mainly by the young woman herself. What she was doing in Paris only she and Valérie Seymour knew, and Stephen had avoided Valérie Seymour's for weeks - how could she bear to compound the sin of her last, kindest-cruellest lie to Mary by making the betrayal she had pretended into reality?

Still, fate - for it was certainly not Stephen, and it could hardly have been Mlle von Hentzau - ensured that they met one morning in the Tuileries. (Stephen, guiltily conscious of how long it had been since David had been allowed to talk to strange dogs or strange humans, had taken him out for a good, long walk.) The strange girl introduced herself without shyness or hesitation, declared that she recognised her from the dustjacket of the French edition of _The Furrow_ , and, after only a few minutes of pleasantries, drew Stephen's face down to her and kissed her.

And Stephen, broken-hearted and only just on the brink of the pit of despair, must kiss her back, this impudent, devil-may-care slip of a girl, because neither of them cared, and just for a night she might forget.

***

3\. Mary Wimsey

She was a duke's daughter, and a socialist, and unhappy. Stephen met her at one of Valérie's salons (because after all Valérie was a friend, and she had no longer any reason to avoid her circle); she deplored the politics, but there was something about her pink-and-white English prettiness, a whiff of country house and park and land, that made Stephen suddenly homesick. 

Mary (she insisted on first name terms, even at that first meeting) spoke of Duke's Denver with affection, and Stephen told her of Morton, and they talked of the green land of the Severn Valley, and the grandeur of the Fens, and Stephen must tell how it came to be that she was exiled from her native soil and living as a stranger here in Paris, and how it was that she had sent Mary Llewellyn away, and was now alone.

Mary listened, and asked, at last, 'But did she want to leave you?'

'No,' Stephen said. 'I had to force her.'

'Did you ask her to leave you?'

And Stephen was bound to confess that she had never asked. 'But I did right. It was better for her this way.'

'Shouldn't she have been the one to decide? Didn't she have a right to know?' 

Stephen almost laughed. The titled socialist berating the county invert for behaving like an autocrat - it was ridiculous. But she could not laugh, because Mary Wimsey had made her think for the first time that perhaps she had been wrong.

***

4\. Mary Lamington

They had met before, back in the anguished London of wartime. Lamington - a nice girl, Stephen had thought, far nicer than Violet Peacock, who had introduced them in the first place - was a V.A.D. She had not thought of her for years.

The second time she met Mary Lamington was the day the wire arrived from Puddle, and a wire from Puddle could mean only one thing. 

Having learned of her mother's death, Stephen must walk around and around Paris. For once, she could not face the wedding-cake splendour of Sacré-Coeur, and so she caught one of the green and cream buses that laboured up Montmartre and hurtled down again, back into the heart of the city. She leaned on the railing of the open back platform and felt the hot, gritty breeze in her face, and was consumed with longing for Morton. At last she got off, and trudged along the Seine, and crossed over to Notre-Dame.

Lighting a candle, she knelt for a long while in anguished prayer - prayer for her mother, and herself, and for she knew not what. It was as she rose that she saw the Englishwoman, holding a small boy by the hand, and knew the glint in her eye for recognition. It took Stephen a few moments to place her. She was approaching, hesitant.

'It's Miss Gordon, isn't it?' she said. 'I don't suppose you remember me; we met during the War. Mary Hannay. Mary Lamington, as was.'

'How do you do,' Stephen said mechanically. 'Yes, I do remember, of course.' She did her best to smile, and nodded to Mrs Hannay's small son, and to her husband, a tall, tanned man who reminded her somehow of Martin. Some impulse made her say, 'I'd love to catch up with you, but I've had some sad news today. Will you be in Paris long?'

'For some weeks,' they said.

'Let me give you my card,' Stephen said. 'Do call.' And she wondered why she had invited her, when the excuse to close the door was there before her.

After the funeral she returned to Paris more homesick than ever, and one day as she sat doodling on her blotter Mary Hannay came to call. She was sympathetic; she asked just enough questions, and left enough unasked, and so Stephen told her more than she ever meant to.

'Why not go back?' Mary asked. 'It sounds as if Morton wants someone to run it.'

Which was true, Stephen knew, but the reasons why that would not do were manifold, and none of them were the sort that one could tell a respectable married mother. 'The County....' she said.

'You'd be surprised at what kind of people the County takes to itself,' Mary said. 'I'm not remotely respectable, and nor is Dick, but they don't mind us playing at being gentry. Why not try? It's your home, after all. It's waiting for you, if you could only stretch out your hand, and take it.'

Perhaps it was.

 


End file.
